““
Kant...defined freedom purely in negative terms: it is a form of causality in which there is no prior inclination which precisely determines what is done or chosen, or determines whether there is an endorsement of a given inclination, or contrary decision to abide by the moral law. To use such a notion in explanation demands, however, that we should give it a positive meaning, and this, in the sense of being able to illustrate it intuitively, is something that we cannot do.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.
“Freedom is not an ordinary concept of which plain illustrations can be given: it is rather a Transcendental Idea whose possible cases transcend illustration.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 304.
“Beings endowed with a will therefore necessarily think of themselves as free, and take themselves to be free, and this is so even if the Idea of freedom has nothing corresponding to it in intuition, and in fact transcends all possible experience…it gives to a transcendent power a definite place in the phenomenal order, even if only in the thought of rational agents. To be obligatorily thinkable seems, in fact to be the characteristic manner in which the transcendently real insinuates itself into phenomenal experience.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.
“Kant comments on the strange circle, which obliges us to believe in our freedom, that is, our non-pathological self-determination, in order to understand the possibility and the necessity of moral laws; but which also obliges us to accept the possibility and necessity of unconditional moral laws in order to understand the possibility and necessity of such freedom (p. 450). The two concepts are in fact equivalent: a will free to determine its direction without the pressures of particular interests must necessarily follow laws of the purest generality—it cannot dispense with all laws since it is a rational power—and a will governed by laws of the purest generality must necessarily be able to resist determination by particular interests.” Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 305.